One of my favorite humor writers, Sarah Vowell, wrote an essay about how when she was in college she had a secret addiction of watching The Godfather. She would sneak home between classes and pop it into the VCR, only to sit poised with the remote control ready to quickly turn it off in case her roommate walked in. She watched it repeatedly – sometimes just her favorite parts, sometimes the whole thing. It was a vice. A covert activity. She had taken something otherwise mundane and normal and, through her own insecure manipulations had made it NAUGHTY.

Today, when Steve got home from work he walked over to where I was planted on the couch (I know, it’s shocking) and craned around look at what I was viewing on the computer. My instinct was to cover the screen. He had caught me in a Godfather moment – correction – one of my Godfather moments. I actually have a couple of Godfathers: some sort of controlled substance that I secretly partake. And right now, it is Court TV’s Crime Library. I am addicted. For those of you who may not know, I have a long history in following tales of True Crime. There was a time in my life when my Saturday mornings were entirely dedicated to watching A&E’s complete line-up of crime and investigation programming. And as for Ann Rule – been there, done that.

I won’t even attempt to defend this twisted and morose interest I have in the seedy underbelly of our culture – the fact that I have read or watched something on just about every serial killer, mob boss and random crime of passion ever to plague society. That’s what makes it my Godfather. It is guilty and shameful, but I do it anyway. Who willingly admits that they actually seek out and read about other people’s pain and suffering? (Apparently, me.)

Aside from my secret fascination with true crime, I also read the gossip pages nearly every day, and have E! Online bookmarked. There’s a reason we don’t have big cable, people. I would need a 12-step program to get me off the E! True Hollywood Story, American Justice and VH1 Behind the Music.

I remember a number of years ago Dore gave me these books titled Hollywood Babylon. I read them cover to cover and then was left drooling for more. It was the perfect combination of both debaucherous Hollywood gossip and true crime. I scoured the internet for days, looking for more books just like them, but only found rehashes of the same thing and gave up searching, realizing that you can only really tell a story once, and that due to my voracious reading on the subject, I had seen it all before.

I mean come on – after all – it is a guilty pleasure, not an obsession. Right?